Chester
Mojay-Sinclare found himself answering two questions when fundraising for
Australian charities during a post-school gap year: how do I decide which
causes to donate to, and how much goes directly to those causes?

Potential donors in the UK can find the
answers to those questions and more on Aliveandgiving.com, the innovative online
charity fundraising start-up that also helps charities to avoid high payment
processing set-up costs and all the headaches that go with sorting out admin
issues. As an alternative to the controversial practice of ‘chugging’, Alive
and Giving has won a number of UCL awards - not to mention received ever-rare positive
press.

With so many charities – around 220,000 in the UK - vying for
donations, and so many potential donors concerned about how their contributions
are being used, perhaps the only surprise is that Alive and Giving
wasn’t thought up sooner. Chester Mojay-Sinclare returned from his travels in
Australia with a plan for an online charity fundraising start-up that would
enable viewers to ‘search, compare and donate’ with comparative ease. The idea
was more timely than he could have imagined.

Shortly after enrolling for a philosophy degree at UCL, Chester pitched
his idea at a London Entrepreneurs’ Challenge workshop. He was approached by
five UCL and London Business School students, who together had the specific
skills to develop a
complex system that can handle large volumes of regular tax-efficient donations
(Alive and Giving processes the Gift Aid on behalf of the charity and takes
care of all the associated admin costs, for a small fee).

The start-up won the London Entrepreneurs’ Challenge 2009, and later a Bright
Ideas Award, in the same week that ‘chugging’, the coercive and sometimes
aggressive fundraising method used by many charities, had received negative press.
“The idea of a business that enables charities to communicate to the public in
a transparent and effective way, while saving themselves thousands of pounds in
payment processing set-up fees, couldn’t have come at a better time,” says Tim
Barnes, Executive Director of UCL Advances.

With prize
money of over £35,000 from both UCL and outside sources, Chester secured an
equity partnership with WooWise Ltd, a social networking company to whom he was
introduced by UCL Advances. Together with his business partner, Melissa
Johnson, who has a Masters in Social Development Practice from UCL, Chester is
looking to increase the number of charities participating, as well as develop new
fundraising technologies due to requests from the charities already featured. He has also been given valuable meeting
space in UCL Advances’ new Business Hatchery.